Art Basel bridges physical and digital worlds, drives engagement with Azure AI Foundry

Art Basel has long been a global force in the art world, curating fairs that span continents and cultures. With fairs in Hong Kong, Basel, Paris, Qatar, and Miami Beach, the organization brings together nearly half a million artists, collectors, and fans each year. But as the scale and complexity of these events grew, so did the need for a more connected experience—one that could bridge the physical and digital worlds without compromising the integrity of the artworks. 

“Digital doesn’t replace the physical experience,” says Alain Brusch, Global Head of Digital Platforms at Art Basel. “We aim to amplify and enhance it.”

Art Basel knew it needed to evolve the experience to retain, attract, and grow its audience. It also needed to find a meaningful way to promote artists and art galleries, ensuring they would continue to find value in participating in its art fairs.

To do that, Art Basel envisioned a new kind of digital companion—one that helps visitors navigate the fair, discover new artists, and engage more deeply with art. The solution needs to be intuitive, secure, and fast. And it needs to put AI directly in the hands of art enthusiasts, artists, and galleries in a way that is both natural and valuable.

Understanding the complexity

Art Basel decided to build an app that would securely synthesize gallery, artwork, attractions, and dining and lodging details across five cities and thousands of galleries. The app would also allow visitors to get more information about the exhibited artworks via a camera scanning feature, the Art Basel Lens. The Art Basel team imagines a fair attendee using the camera in the app to photograph a sculpture, for example, then immediately receiving artist, gallery, and related information about the sculpture. What’s more, the team wants to make strides in offering proper attribution to artists and galleries, and make it easy to share the artwork information on social media or contact the gallery. 

The multiple complexities of the project require a sophisticated tech stack. It needs the scalability to adapt to different visitor loads throughout the year, the flexibility to ingest and produce different content formats, and the security to help ensure personal recommendations stay personal. Compliance considerations are also paramount, as Art Basel operates in countries where Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policies are in place. 

A new canvas for connection

To bring the vision to life, Art Basel collaborated with UIC Digital and Valorem Reply to build AI-based engagement features in the app powered by Microsoft Copilot. The app includes a conversational AI companion for nuanced queries and personalized recommendations, along with the Art Basel Lens, a real-time artwork recognition feature. Under the hood, the app is a complex orchestration of Azure AI Foundry products such as Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, Azure AI Search, and Azure Machine Learning, designed to deliver performance, scalability, and compliance across a global footprint.

“With Microsoft, we feel understood in our mission. We see eye to eye on what we can accomplish, and Microsoft has the capabilities to turn ideas into experiences,” says Brusch.

Synthesizing data across four cities and hundreds of galleries

From the beginning, one of the core challenges was data integration. Synthesizing information from hundreds of galleries and thousands of pieces of artwork means there’s no format standard. Information is available in Word docs, PowerPoints, photos, PDFs, and other formats.

“The data wasn’t built for this use case,” says Gabor Kajtar, Technical Director at UIC Digital, which helped build the app. “We had to centralize data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a custom CMS, and a homegrown artwork database, then make it accessible to the AI companion in a performant and scalable way.”

Azure Cosmos DB stores and safeguards structured and unstructured data, while Azure AI Search enables fast, semantic filtering and retrieval. Azure API Management serves as the gateway for all app interactions, and Azure Container Apps and Azure Functions power the serverless back end.

For quick, accurate language processing and content generation in the form of tailored recommendations, the app uses Azure OpenAI.

Microsoft was a deliberate, considered choice. “Azure gave us the tools to build, test, and deploy quickly. Everything was automated. That let us focus on solving real problems, not managing infrastructure,” says Kajtar.

Real-time artwork recognition with the Art Basel Lens

The Art Basel Lens, developed by Valorem Reply, UIC Digital, and Art Basel, allows users to scan artwork with their phone camera and instantly receive attribution details, including artist and gallery information. The content is formatted for multiple use cases, such as easy sharing on social media or getting in touch with the gallery directly to inquire about purchasing. Achieving this requires a sophisticated AI pipeline capable of processing images in under two seconds. 

“When someone takes a photo, we crop the image to isolate the artwork, generate embeddings, and search for a match in our vector index,” explains Sean Smith, Practice Lead, Data and AI at Valorem Reply. “If the similarity score is above an acceptable threshold, we return the match with metadata. All of that happens in about two seconds.”

The Lens uses AI vision for image analysis because of its advanced algorithms, which can separate features in an image. Machine Learning accelerates the training for the cropping models, and AI Search, chosen for its comprehensive set of advanced search technologies, performs the similarity search. Azure Functions orchestrates the workflow, and Azure Blob Storage and Azure Cosmos DB manage image and metadata storage.

“We trained the model on public artwork datasets and gallery-provided images,” says Smith. “We had to account for real-world conditions—poor lighting, odd angles, people standing in front of the art, and artwork of various shapes and sizes. The scalability and flexibility of Azure provided exactly what we needed.”

Security, compliance, and global scale

Given the international scope of Art Basel’s fairs, the solution must meet stringent requirements for data privacy, identity management, and regulatory compliance. All services run within the Art Basel tenant, with data encrypted at rest and in transit.

The global network of datacenters within Azure helps ensure low-latency performance across continents, while built-in compliance with GDPR and other standards gives Art Basel confidence in its data governance.

Brusch notes, “Microsoft’s enterprise-grade security and compliance posture was a key reason we standardized on the Azure platform. We need a partner we can trust to scale with us and protect our users.”

A foundation for the future

With the Art Basel Companion and Lens now live, the organization is already seeing signs of impact. Artists and galleries benefit from increased visibility and proper attribution. Visitors navigate the fair more easily and engage more deeply with the artworks. And the broader art community is exploring AI as a tool for discovery and connection.

“As a collector, cataloguing my collection, understanding trends, identifying similarities and connections across artists and galleries is important,” says Leo Tan, a private art collector in Hong Kong. “The Art Basel app helps me do all that with ease.”

“We’re seeing more engagement, more returning visits, and more time spent in the app,” says Brusch. “But more importantly, we’re seeing people use it in ways that feel natural—like asking the AI companion for recommendations or scanning an artwork to learn more.”

The app is also helping Art Basel prepare for the future. With a highly secure, scalable, and compliant foundation built on the Microsoft stack, the team is exploring new features like wayfinding, restaurant bookings, and year-round discovery experiences.

“We’re just at the beginning of our journey,” says Brusch. “The app is still in its infancy—it needs to grow. But we’ve built something that can evolve with our users and with the art world.”

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